Re: Official Inclusion of GCC Extension Modules (Or similar)

[Ben Elliston <bje at au1 dot ibm dot com>]

On Sat, 2007-08-25 at 17:00 +1000, Brendon Costa wrote:

> I have a project that could benefit a lot from using something similar
> to GEM (http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/gem/). I have not used GEM (As
> doing so is pointless currently and thus my email), but to summarise for
> others not familiar with it following is an except from their website:
> 
> GEM is ... "a framework for writing compiler extensions as dynamically
> loaded modules... similar to that of the the Linux Security Modules project"
> 
> The problem with GEM is that any benefits gained from using GEM itself
> are meaningless unless GEM is included as part of the official GCC
> distribution to allow the official GCC to be extended with "plugins".

I'm not sure how GEM (another Stony Book University project) relates to
the talk given at this year's GCC Summit, but there was a talk about a
plug-in architecture for GCC to allow modules to operate on the GIMPLE
IR ("Extending GCC with Modular GIMPLE Optimisations" by Sean Callanan).

This work was well received and is currently being prepared on a branch;
I expect it will be introduced to the mainline at some point.  You might
like to check out the proceedings of the summit for more details on it:

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/HomePage?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=GCC2007-Proceedings.pdf

Cheers, Ben